© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved
Folly, Session Poems, and the Preparations for Pope's Dunciads
University of Birmingham and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
Folly. A Poem (1727), an anonymous session poem of which only four copies are now known, is probably the work of Thomas Fitzgerald, usher at Westminster School. This article transcribes the poem and identifies its themes and targets, which include Richard Bentley, Colley Cibber, Ambrose Philips, and John (‘Orator’) Henley. The attribution to Fitzgerald is supported by a contemporary attribution and by a comparison with his acknowledged works. Its resemblance to elements in Pope's manuscript sketch for the Dunciad that would not be made public until the appearance of The Dunciad in Four Books in 1743 suggests the likelihood of contact and possibly of active co-operation between the two authors. It is probably significant that Folly seems to have been printed, like the 1728 Dunciad, by James Bettenham. Pope and Fitzgerald had Tory friends in common; and the importance of Westminster School in the training of statesmen, churchmen, and writers, as well as its associations with Francis Atterbury, made it a focus of Pope's thinking about the cultural and political state of the nation. Pope may have hoped that Folly, like Peri Bathous, would prompt attacks on him that would have appeared to justify counter-attacks in the Dunciad: if so, it would appear that he was disappointed.